Monday, May 25, 2009

Shortly After God Became God


Shortly after God became God

In the beginning God felt very small in the infinite darkness.
An empty place, if you can imagine. An ocean of emptiness.
Not even a single note on the holy scale to call home. Zero.
God was bored. Without knowing how to express this notion,
God looked around for something to do
and there was a miraculous pronoun waiting for God to try on.
The pronoun was the word Me, and God, slipping it on like a new coat,
became God. The coat, which was the first simile, was the universe.

Or It.

So God plus It equaled everything.
He didn’t forget the ocean. The emptiness of ocean.
Full of everything.

Looking back on this event with our futile but heroic hindsight,
this also was the beginning of language,
which may or may not have been a mistake.

Millions of light years passed like a cold wind in North Dakota,
and stars were busy making themselves and unmaking themselves.
Then one day, on a tiny particle of mud at the edge of a round spinning ball
warmed by a star somewhere out in the boondocks of the universe,
an amphibian climbed up out of the slime chewing on plankton.

Like winning the lottery.

God was not paying attention because God was learning to dance.


Bobby Byrd

Posted over on Newspaper Tree

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